Free Tools for VMware Administrators

In this blog, i will be sharing Free Tools for VMware Administrators that will help VMware administrators to manage the Virtual environment efficiently. Below list contains various Free tools that include Backup Tools, Health monitoring, Monitoring tools and Syslog servers.

The SSL Certificate Automation Tool is a command-line utility that automates the Self- or CA-signed certificate renewal process. Of particular significance is the Update Steps Planner, which allows you to plan the sequence of certificate updates for the components. This prevents errors in the process that might otherwise occur.

vSphere Management Assistant (vMA) allows administrators and developers to run scripts and agents to manage ESXi hosts and vCenter Server systems. vMA is a virtual machine that includes prepackaged software, a logging component, and an authentication component that supports non-interactive login.

Auto Deploy GUI is a vSphere plug-in for the VMware vSphere Auto Deploy component. The GUI plug-in allows a user to easily manage the setup and deployment requirements in a stateless environment managed by Auto Deploy. Some of the features provided through the GUI include the ability to add/remove Depots, list/create/modify Image Profiles, list VIB details, create/modify rules to map hosts to Image Profiles, check compliance of hosts against these rules and re-mediate hosts.

This Fling scans all PSCs connected to a single PSC. It will detect the versions of all the vCenter Servers connected to PSCs and all the Solutions connected to vCenter Servers. It will then depict the connectivity in pictorial form.

The SDDC Discovery Tool gives users a holistic view of their SDDC deployment. By collecting vCenter server credentials from the user, the tool is able to discover all of the products installed in the deployment by recursive probing.

The VMware OS Optimization Tool helps optimize Windows 7/8/2008/2012/10 systems for use with VMware Horizon View. The optimization tool includes customizable templates to enable or disable Windows system services and features, per VMware recommendations and best practices, across multiple systems. Since most Windows system services are enabled by default, the optimization tool can be used to easily disable unnecessary services and features to improve performance.

VisualEsxtop is an enhanced version of resxtop and esxtop. VisualEsxtop can connect to VMware vCenter Server or ESX hosts, and display ESX server stats with a better user interface and more advanced features.

VMware I/O Analyzer is an integrated framework designed to measure storage performance in a virtual environment and to help diagnose storage performance concerns. I/O Analyzer, supplied as an easy-to-deploy virtual appliance, automates storage performance analysis through a unified interface that can be used to configure and deploy storage tests and view graphical results for those tests. I/O Analyzer can use Iometer to generate synthetic I/O loads or a trace replay tool to deploy real application workloads.

vSphere HTML5 Web Client Fling is a standalone appliance that can be deployed in your existing or new vSphere 6.0 and later environments in a transparent manner. The Fling does not make any changes to your existing vCenter or Platform Services Controller components. Nor does it affect any operations, such as the use of the current vSphere Web Client, as it is meant to run side by side.

Vmss2core is a tool to convert VMware checkpoint state files into formats that third party debugger tools understand. It can handle both suspend (.vmss) and snapshot (.vmsn) checkpoint state files (hereafter referred to as a ‘vmss file’) as well as both monolithic and non-monolithic (separate .vmem file) encapsulation of checkpoint state data. This tool can produce core dump files for the Windows debugger (WinDbg), Red Hat crash compatible core files, a physical memory view suitable for the Gnu debugger gdb, Solaris MDB (XXX), and Mac OS X formats.

vCheck is a PowerShell HTML framework script, the script is designed to run as a scheduled task before you get into the office to present you with key information via an email directly to your inbox in a nice easily readable format.

HPE OneView for VMware vCenter is software for VMware’s vCenter management console which enables the vSphere administrator to quickly obtain context-aware information about HPE servers and HPE storage in their VMware vSphere environment directly from within vCenter.
This enables the vSphere administrator to easily manage physical servers and storage, data stores and virtual machines. By providing the ability to clearly view and directly manage relationships between virtual machines, and HPE Infrastructure, the VMware administrator’s productivity increases, as does the ability to ensure quality of service.

Veeam® Backup Free Edition is a must-have FREE tool for ad-hoc virtual machine (VM) backup, restore and management in VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual environments. With no agents to deploy, powerful recovery options and VeeamZIP™, you get flexibility in options and a reliable solution for important VMs.
Whether you are locked in a legacy backup contract or are operating within a tight budget, you’ll find this FREE VM backup software helpful for your daily VM management.

Veeam FastSCP can copy files over 6 times faster than WinSCP and other SCP-based tools as it uses full network capacity. The Veeam FastSCP engine also features traffic compression and empty block removal for best file copy performance. Note: Now Veeam FastSCP is part of Veeam Backup Free Edition

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Veeam ONE Free Edition

Veeam® ONE™ Free Edition is a risk-free way to experience many of the same benefits that Veeam ONE brings to virtualization management.
With no restrictions on the number of hosts, management servers and failover clusters on which you can monitor and report, Veeam ONE Free Edition helps improve your virtual environment’s Availability, detecting issues before they have operational impact with: 24×7 real-time monitoring, Easy documentation and management reporting, Resource optimization And more!

Veeam® Endpoint Backup™ FREE provides a simple solution for backing up Windows-based desktops and laptops. With Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE, you can easily back up your PC to an external hard drive, NAS (network-attached storage) share or a Veeam Backup & Replication™ repository. And if your system crashes, hard drive fails, or a file gets corrupted or accidentally deleted, you can recover what you need in minutes — like it never even happened.

Extrasphere is a set of tools for managing VM data in vSphere environments, including VM migration, hot mirroring and encryption scenarios. Extrasphere provides unique technology of VM disks and configuration migration without downtime for a standalone VMware ESXi 5.0-6.0 host. The migration of VM disks is totally downtime-free, while for configuration migration a very short pause of VM is required.

With Extrasphere you can perform conversion of VM disks from thin to thick and vice versa without affecting your business processes and what’s most important all can be done on a completely standalone ESXi host.

All operations can be done without having VMware vCenter and you also won’t need expensive vSphere license with Storage vMotion feature – Extrasphere supports even vSphere Hypervisor (free) license.

Virtual Health Monitor is a free virtualization monitoring and reporting tool for VMware, Hyper-V, RHEV, and XenServer environments. Virtual Health Monitor is a free real-time performance monitoring solution that can be deployed broadly across multiple hypervisor platforms. It enables you to gain visibility into your entire infrastructure, see and identify problems in real time, and generate performance and efficiency reports.

Get at-a-glance insight into host to datastore connections
Get insight into datastore connections with the worst response times
See the busiest VMs using those connections
See a breakdown of the datastore including type and device

Free multi-threaded TFTP Server uploads and downloads executable images and configurations to routers and switches with ease. It is the most robust, widely-trusted, and easiest-to-use free TFTP Server available.

Kiwi Syslog Server Free Edition you can collect, view and archive up to 5 sources including routers, computers or other devices. Logs may also be written to disk—either in one large file or split up by day or priority.

Alerts on account lockouts and helps you troubleshoot each event and determine the root cause so you can quickly restore vital services. Accounts can be unlocked from the Netwrix Account Lockout Examiner console or your mobile device.

Vembu Recovery CD eases up Bare-metal Recovery process by restoring the backed up image data of the source disk or partition to the same or new hardware. In addition to this, it is also used to set up the BCD boot configuration to the backed up image data.

Backup unlimited files and folders from your Windows Desktops, Laptops and Mac machines without any feature restrictions. After initial full backup only the modified data will be backed up by Vembu NetworkBackup agent.

Vembu ImageBackup offers comprehensive Backup and Disaster Recovery solution for Windows Desktops and Laptops at FREE of cost. It backs up entire system image or individual volumes of Windows Desktops and Laptops. During system crash or any major disaster, Bare-metal Recovery (BMR) helps to recover the backed up Windows machines into same or different hardware.

Vembu BDR Suite Free Edition offers Backup and Recovery for both virtual and physical environments forever with no costs involved. With agentless backups for virtual environments, multiple recovery options, in-house file system for efficient storage management and secured data transmission, Vembu BDR Suite presents a free edition software which is best suited for all types of businesses who wish to experience the simple and comprehensive backup and recovery solution.

AutoConf iSCSI creates the iSCSI configuration following best practices for ESXi 4, 5 and 6 (new in version 2.1)
It currently works for HPE 3PAR StoreServ, HPE MSA P2000, HPE StoreVirtual and Dell Equallogic

PeekMon is a free tool for monitoring servers. It’s very versatile and can be used on any type of server (Unix/Linux, Windows …). It actually connects to your server by opening a TCP socket on a defined port and will display the latency.

SvSAN eliminates the need for physical SANs, prevents downtime for business critical applications, and lowers IT operating and acquisition cost.
StorMagic’s easy-to-use virtual SAN converts internal disk, flash and memory of two or more servers into a robust, shared-storage appliance.

The primary purpose of this tool is to estimate WAN latency based on the light signal propagation time over a fibre link. This tool does not take into account any additional delays that may be introduced by communication protocols, routing, encryptions, data transformation, etc.

This subnet calculator can help you with the following tasks:
Identify subnet parameters for a given IP address and subnet mask (or CIDR prefix).
Display subnet parameters for a number of consecutive subnets of the specified length.

BROCADE SAN HEALTHGet an accurate view of your SAN environment with time-saving reports and enhanced change tracking. This powerful diagnostic uses a data capture application and a back-end report processing engine. After capturing switch diagnostic data, it automatically generates a Visio topology diagram and a detailed report of SAN fabrics, switches, and individual ports. Other useful information includes alerts, historical performance graphs, and recommended best practices.

FreeNAS is an operating system that can be installed on virtually any hardware platform to share data over a network. FreeNAS is the simplest way to create a centralized and easily accessible place for your data. Use FreeNAS with ZFS to protect, store, backup, all of your data. FreeNAS is used everywhere, for the home, small business, and the enterprise.

Openfiler converts an industry standard x86_64 architecture system into a full-fledged NAS/SAN appliance or IP storage gateway and provides storage administrators with a powerful tool to cope with burgeoning storage needs.
Openfiler ensures that storage administrators are able to make the best use of system performance and storage capacity resources when allocating and managing storage in a multi-platform network.
Openfiler provides key features such as iSCSI target for virtualization, Fibre Channel target support, block level replication and High Availabilty that are the mainstay of any business critical storage environment.

PRTG Network Monitor is a free syslog server: one sensor type in PRTG is the Syslog Receiver, which receives and analyzes syslog messages, stored in a high performance database. This means that the content of received syslog messages can be checked and an alarm can be triggered depending on the content and severity. The freeware version of PRTG allows for up to 100 sensors.

Webserver Stress Tool is a powerful HTTP-client/server test application designed to pinpoint critical performance issues in your web site or web server that may prevent optimal experience for your site’s visitors.

WhatsUp Gold’s free Syslog Server provides you with a feature rich tool to help you manage your syslog needs, including enhanced export capabilities. View the messages in real-time or filter results data the way you need to see it. Take charge of your network by understanding the data your devices are giving you.

Free Visual Traceroute tool displays the route a packet takes across a network and provides detailed response time information hop-by-hop from start to finish, continuously, over a specified duration or one-time – you choose.

Identify active hosts using ICMP and TCP, Utilize multiple scanning deep-level technologies to find open ports, Bookmark scanning configurations as favorites for quick access, Utilize the included database of known ports, or customize it to your environment

Monitoring a network with multitude of services, devices and dependencies between them is complex enough. No need to make set-up or maintenance of the monitoring system itself any more complex. That’s why Icinga 2 features a new configuration format that is intuitive to write, efficient to execute and even adjusts to the changing conditions of your environment at run-time.

Splunk Light is a comprehensive solution for small IT environments that automates log search and analysis. It speeds tactical troubleshooting by gathering real-time log data from your distributed applications and infrastructure in one place to enable powerful searches, dynamic dashboards and alerts, and reporting for real-time analysis

Nagios Log Server is a powerful centralized enterprise-class log monitoring and management application that allows organizations to quickly and easily view, sort, and configure logs from any source on any given network. Log Server is designed to analyze, collect, and store log data based on custom specifications and provide users with extended insight into the data on their network’s infrastructure
All downloads feature a free 60-day fully functional version of the software.

ghettoVCB script performs backups of virtual machines residing on ESX(i) 3.x, 4.x, 5.x & 6.x servers using methodology similar to VMware’s VCB tool. The script takes snapshots of live running virtual machines, backs up the master VMDK(s) and then upon completion, deletes the snapshot until the next backup

WinSCP is an open source free SFTP client, FTP client, WebDAV client and SCP client for Windows. Its main function is file transfer between a local and a remote computer. Beyond this, WinSCP offers scripting and basic file manager functionality.

ESXi-Customizer-PS is a Powershell script that greatly simplifies and automates the process of creating fully patched and customized ESXi 5.x and 6.x installation ISOs using the VMware PowerCLI ImageBuilder module/snapin.

ESXi-Customizer is a user-friendly script that automates the process of customizing the ESXi install-ISO with drivers that are not originally included. Unlike other scripts and manuals that are available for this purpose ESXi-Customizer runs entirely on Windows and does not require any knowledge of or access to Linux.

Disclaimer:

The information in this blog is provided “AS IS” with no warranties, and confers no rights. This blog does not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my employer. It is solely my opinion.